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June 2010
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By globalistgirl, on June 13th, 2010

Ebb and flow in how I see my identity

I haven’t posted in a long time. My husband asked me about it a while back, and my answer was that nothing much had happened in my life that related to being a third culture kid. Adult third culture kid now, I suppose. Anyway, he pointed out that we had gone through the process of applying for a green card for me, and that related. I guess that’s true. But it still didn’t spur me to write. I decided to not say anything if I didn’t really have anything to say about being a third culture kid. Maybe it’s because it’s just another set of papers that will also be inadequate for describing my identity. It’s nice, in that I now have a formal paper tie to my favorite home country. But they’re still just papers.

On the other hand, I watched the Baader Meinhof Complex and Grand Ècole today. Watching stories in European settings made me keenly aware of how I experience distant proximities – things that are physically distant but feel emotionally close – because I’m a third culture kid. I recognize the leftist rhetoric of the RAF from Sweden. I knew kids in school whose parents were in some radical leftist organization that was spied on by the secret police. I recognize the styles of conversation, the landscapes, the apartment highrises. They look like the one my parents are sleeping in as I type. And I realized that my husband can watch such movies but not see the same thing I see, because it’s both emotionally and physically distant to him.

I also met a man from Mexico at a barbecue last week. I could see we were very similar – insiders and outsiders at the same time. I recognized the looks he got from the others for telling funny stories about Brazil, Portugese, and his Spanish. (Which were similar to some of my Swedish-Norwegian stories.) But I also recognized the ease with which he sat down in a patio full of white Americans. He was not a stranger, he belonged – if only more visibly partially than I, who am white and sound like and American when I speak. I knew he knew when we both said the same thing about disliking communism because we knew so much about it at the same time. And I was right – he married an American too.

My husband thought it was strange that I thought we had had shared experiences. I think it is strange that he cannot see. But this – this is more than just paperwork. These experiences and differences in how I and locals in my life see things, these are the things I wanted to blog about. So here’s a new post, for once in a long time.

June 13th, 2010 | Tags: | Category: Uncategorized | 937 comments

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